A few notes about Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker

After all the work putting together a three-hour podcast for Club de Jazz to celebrate Charlie Parker-s centennial (in Spanish), these are few notes I've jotted down: 

• Having listened to over 90% of his recordings and read a good chunk of the relevant literature, the conclusion is inescapable: Charlie Parker was a genius. He was also called Bird and, even though he did not have "Christopher" as middle name officially, there is at least one document (a hotel registry from 1951) signed by him, as "Charles Christopher Parker, Jr.". 

• As it happens with other African-American artists, when it comes to Bird it seems that personal matters are more important than music. The emotional pull of his personal history is understandable, even from a sympathetic point of view, but do believe me, all that pales in the face of his music. 

• A black artist with addiction problems playing sophisticated music calls for esoteric explanations for his genius. Us listeners tend to forget that, as sublime as it may be, music springs from a mechanical effort, and Parker is no exception. As a teenager he practiced all day, every day for a long time, as he told his altoist colleague Paul Desmond (audio/transcription). Good old hard work would be, then, the necessary condition, and even if it's not sufficient to reach Parkerian heights, Desmond's relief at hearing Parker's explanation is noticeable. 

• Parker may well be the jazz musician with the largest number of analytical pages about him: see the treatises by Thomas Owens, Larry Koch, Carl Woideck, and Henry Martin, His recordings have been dissected under the microscope, and—yet more proof of his genius—even though we know how Parker's music works, play it and the mystery is still there. 

• As per Owens, Parker drew from a collection of about 100 motifs to put his solos together, pretty much regardless of the tune at hand; later Martin argued that his improvisations were indeed related to the tune, In any case, he pretty much played just blues and songs, what we call standards, a rather limited repertoire. Parker's musical boundaries are then well defined and known; and still, his imagination and creativity sound boundless. 

• Parker was an African-American child of the 1920s and, as such, he got serious formal musical tuition while in school. Besides, he grew up within a musical tradition, that of Kansas City (Missouri), the Midwest's hub of business and nightly entertainment at the time. This brought abundant supply and demand of musicians, which raised standards. The best local orchestra, Bennie Moten's included future stars like Ben Webster, Hot Lips Page, Count Basie and a few of the latter's first band. After Moten's untimely death, Basie had a nonet with altoist Buster Smith.  When Basie left for Chicago and then New York, Smith stayed behind. They called him "professor". Parker would play in his band. You can hear Smith playing here.

• Some of that local tradition is based on the blues. The blues is/are many things, from a metaphor of the struggles and triumphs of African-American life, to a distinct set of musical devices. Parker grew up soaked in the blues and kept them at the centre of his new way of playing, paving the way for its revival as part of Hard Bop. For proof of Parker's musical and emotive reach, listen to the "Requiem" dedicated to him by white, and allegedly cold and cerebral, pianist Lennie Tristano. 

• 1945. World War II is finally over with the first two atomic bombs dropped on civilians. The world changes dramatically and, with it, that small patch of humanity that is jazz: the balance between orchestras for dancing and small groups for listening begins to tilt towards the latter, and higher standards of dexterity, already displayed by players like Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins, become the norm. In that context, Parker, together with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, expand the possibilities of jazz beyond immediate enjoyment. 

• Be bop, unfortunate tag, born from that quintessentially American marriage of art and commerce. On the one hand, it represents an artistic praxis beyond repproach: instrumental virtuosity, harmonic and rhythmic innovation, emotive pull; on the other, the youthful outlandish attires and attitudes that filled news pages, like rockabilly and punk would do in the future. 

• This change of paradigm affected music, aesthetics and even logistics—the transition from ballrooms to clubs and cafes, the first jazz festivals, the international tours—and Parker was a significant part in it. The main jazz musicians in the following 40/50 years came out from under his wings, if not straight from his bands: Miles Davis, Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Kenny Dorham, John Lewis... were once his sidemen. Contemporaries like Dizzy, his big band's rhythm section (later known as the Modern Jazz Quartet), Sarah Vaughan, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell... Sax players who openly followed his lead, like John Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Benny Golson, James Moody, Phil Woods, Gene Quill... So overbearing was his dominance, that a career in music could be started by just not copying him, like Lee Konitz did.

Like several generations of musicians, John Coltrane looks up to Charlie Parker
Jimmy Heath's band, Elate Club Ballroom,
Philadelphia, December 7, 1947

• A new time, a shocking new music, the genius Paul Desmond wondered about... too many people believed the explanation was heroin. In the fringes of society everything's riskier. Parker himself was still a minor when he got hooked, and tried to make it bearable by drinking alcohol, which eventually killed him.

• Youth, music and drugs in post-WWII America: Woody Herman's reed section, the original four brothers (Stan Getz-20, Zoot Sims-22, Serge Chaloff-24, the latter, their in-house dealer) recorded an orchestrated solo of Parker's, ten months after he made the original, an instant homage with few precedents: "Singing the Blues" by Beiderbecke/Trumbauer (1927), then Fletcher Henderson (1931); and "West End Blues" by Louis Armstrong (1928), then Charlie Barnet (1944).

• About "West End Blues": Parker incorporated it in his solos around 1949-50. Intergenerational rivalries were overhyped.

• Parker left too soon, and not just because he was 34, but for historical reasons too: he never recorded in stereo; or at Rudy Van Gelder's; or for jazz classic label Blue Note (established in 1939). Hank Mobley did Soul Station in 1960: imagine Parker at 40 with that rhythm section (Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Art Blakey) on the same label.

• Parker's career is not a uniform block. His life, rather than short, was condensed, fast and movable. His music too: just compare the 1945 concert at Town Hall with the 1953 gig at the Open Door, where he flies altissimo with unprecedented urgency, at least in part thanks to Art Taylor's driving drumming.

• And the music? The podcast I mentioned above has a selection of it (the link shows the playlist).

Negative tips: two works have too much weight on our perception of Charlie Parker, Ross Russell's biography and Clint Eastwood's Bird. This is not fair for anyone. 

• When it came out, Ross Russell's biography was well received, but in time it has lost its reputation. As an example, his tale about the famous concert at Massey Hall in 1953 is just an unjustified flight of his imagination, as I told elsewhere.
• The power of moving images is yet again demonstrated by Clint Eastwood's Bird. I just re-watched the film. Even with Parker's chronology fresh in my mind, the flash-backs and -forwards were confusing. The bias favouring the two main contributors, Chan Richardson, Parker's last partner and mother of two of his kids, and Red Rodney, one of his trumpet players, was to be expected, but still excessive. Telling Parker's stay in Camarillo with no mention of Doris Sydnor, his previous wife, is too large a dramatic licence. "Dizzy"'s sermon to Parker about personal responsibility sounds too close to the director's personal creed. Worst of all, though is the portrayal of Parker as some sort of powerless idiot-savant. Parker had a difficult, turbulent life, yes, but it was full of top-level music. And he certainly wasn't powerless.

Positive tips:  

• Bird - The Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert Reisner was the first book published about Parker, and it's a good counterweight to the film Bird. It's a choral book, with testimonies from 81 people who knew Parker in different capacities, some of them quite telling, like Shorty Baker's who was sure Parker was older than him (he was six years younger). This choral quality gives out a multifaceted image of Parker that feels more real. Interestingly, the most repeated observation refers to his generosity: with money when he had any cash on him, and with his encouragement towards other musicians.
• Chasin' the Bird by Brian Priestley is an exemplary book. Brief, concise, and to the point. It weeds out the myths and sticks to what was known at the time (Chuck Haddix's and Stanley Crouch's books, with new information, came later); his analysis, description, rather, of Parker's music is crystalline and manages to anticipate the reader's questions when listening to Parker. 
• For raw, hard data on chronology and discography, Peter Losin's website is indispensable.
• And of course, this is not the first time Charlie Parker is featured in this blog.